Exactly seven weeks after Harold Prince died at the age of 91, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has opened the exhibition “In The Company of Harold Prince: Broadway producer, director, collaborator.” Three years in the making (and in part a collaboration with Prince himself), the exhibition features photographs, documents, posters, original costumes and set models from many of his shows, as well as old video interviews with him and his theatrical collaborators. There are also some state of the art exhibits, such as a computer that offers up your choice of scripts from his many shows. And some memorable objects: Ruth Mitchell, his long time stage manager and associate producer gave him the gift of a roulette wheel in 1998, printed with the names of his shows, both successes and failures, to illustrate what they both knew — that each new show is a gamble.
The exhibition, which will run through March 31, 2020, focuses on Prince’s collaborators and has a thesis — that Hal Prince reinvented musical theater, transforming the model created by Rodgers and Hammerstein into “a more visual, almost cinematic art form in which the director is auteur.”
